Trump and the Case of Congressional Ethics

Representative Robert Goodlatte, of Virginia, leaving the House Republican Conference meeting on Tuesday.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL CLARK / CQ ROLL CALL VIA GETTY

How much does Donald Trump care about congressional ethics? The principles at stake can’t bother him much, it’s reasonable to say, given the choices that he has made so far regarding his own conflicts, and in a hundred other areas. That is what congressional Republicans may have guessed when, late in the evening of Monday, a federal holiday, they made the dismantling of the Office of Congressional Ethics the first order of business for their new term. So much during the election year had pushed the limits of self-parody, so why shouldn’t they? For about eighteen hours, it looked like a triumph for legalized graft. Under the new measure, the ethics office would not be independent, would not be allowed to talk to the press, would not be able to do, really, anything. And the Republicans who had pushed their caucus to back it, led by Representative Robert Goodlatte, of Virginia, had done so in a closed meeting with no warning, as part of a package of rules changes. The G.O.P. representatives were absolutely correct in thinking that the Trump years are shaping up to be a bitter farce, in terms of good government, and a tragedy in other ways—bereft, for example, of real efforts to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. What they were confused about was the part that they are expected to play. This became clear on Monday night, as critics from all sides pelted the congressmen with their own absurdity, and, the next morning, when Trump began to tweet.

“With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it,” Trump began, continuing in a second tweet, “may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! ‪#DTS.” “DTS” stands for “Drain the swamp,” one of the companion chants to “Lock her up!” during the Presidential campaign. It hasn’t been looking all that drained. What’s most telling about Trump’s tweet, and the possible source of the congressmen’s confusion, is that Trump is not objecting to the idea of “weakening” the watchdogs; he is just annoyed that the congressional Republicans are doing it on what he considers to be his time. They don’t have their priorities straight. This is not an office that would ever go after him, so why are they wasting his political capital crippling it? In the world as seen from Trump Tower, that’s practically political embezzlement.

A couple of hours after Trump tweeted, the Republican conference met again, in what Politico described as an “emergency meeting” called by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and, for now, abandoned the plan. Reportedly, the ethics-gutting embarrassed McCarthy and Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House; supposedly, Ryan (who was reëlected as Speaker on Tuesday) had never liked the idea, at least behind closed doors, though on Tuesday morning he claimed that it would leave Congress as ethical as ever, for whatever that’s worth. So how did it get as far as it did? The partisanship in the House is such that what counts, generally, is simply who gets the majority when the Republicans meet as a caucus—the majority of the majority—which the Party is then expected to get behind. This meant that the ethics-rule change looked like a done deal because Republicans alone favored including it in that rules package by a margin of 119–74. (A number of Democrats, some of whom have their own ethical problems, might have favored the measure, too.) That is no reason to feel sorry for Ryan, who has lived by and fortified this culture. There were moments during the campaign when Ryan was critical of Trump. But in its last days he campaigned for Trump by name. Ryan seems to have his own gold-painted fantasies of what that means. He talks frequently about how much “Donald” likes his ideas. If, in his focus on getting Trump’s help in dismantling the safety net, he let himself be exposed to a day of humiliation, he can’t be surprised. Nor does he deserve much credit for his late effort, with the reversal of the rule change, to salvage his dignity. Indeed, by doing it so quickly after the Trump tweets he has made himself look all the more like the President-elect’s messenger, or maybe his intern.

One mystery of all this is how the Republicans could have been so foolish—so conspicuous—given the populist rhetoric they themselves benefitted from in the past election. But when politicians become too used to saying things that they don't believe, it becomes easy for them to forget that members of the public might actually be dismayed. And if they thought that Trump would cover for them, and help make them look good, the picture is that much more pathetic. (Chris Christie, now slumping in his office in Trenton, seems to have believed that, too.) Maybe, looking at the way business is done in the Tower, the congressional Republicans imagined that they might have a role like that ascribed to Trump’s adult children, seeking out the projects they liked and then bringing them to him for a wave of the hand. They may have thought that, when they smiled at his speeches, they’d shimmer a little, like Ivanka. Or maybe they thought that they’d be like his foreign partners, paying a modest fee to license the Trump name, using it to bring the locals into the golf course and keeping the serious money for themselves. They appear to have been wrong. In this case, they were the low-level Atlantic City contractors, sending a bill to Manhattan for the electrical work, having eagerly helped to build something bankrupt, and not even getting paid.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.